Hound of Eden Omnibus

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “Well, uh… you generally know you’re gay when you’re attracted to other men,” Zane finally said.

  “Attracted how?” I frantically searched back for how I’d felt around Angkor and Christopher. “Attracted to companionship? Or magnetically? Or does it have to be… you know… genitals?”

  He stifled a laugh. “It’s not any one thing, man. It’s not like there’s a form you fill out to get your Gay Passport. If you like dudes, you like dudes. It’s that simple.”

  “Don’t you have to, well...” I dithered off.

  Zane stared at me. “Have to what?”

  “Well, I mean...” Flustered, I gestured in strangled silence with the flashlight, the beam crazing off the walls and ceiling. “Aren’t gay men… different? Somehow? I mean, made differently?”

  “Okay. These are REALLY uncomfortable questions, alright? Like, borderline homophobic bullshit uncomfortable.” Zane made a sound of exasperation.

  Homophobic? Frightened of gay people? That actually sounded… well, fairly accurate. I was weighed down by a lifetime of guilt and confusion that felt to me the same way this basement smelled and tasted. I remembered the way I’d lain awake in the dorm I’d shared with Vassily, jealously disgusted by the sounds of awkward teenage sex coming from his side of the apartment. I remembered the way Angkor looked at me, the stir I’d felt in my jaws when he angled his head just the right way. The taste of salt on Christopher’s neck. The way I’d felt when he... ugh.

  I sighed. “I know they do. The words aren’t coming out the way I want them to. I just don’t get it.”

  “If you weren’t my friend, I’d have punched you by now,” Zane said. “You know that, right?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.” I slashed a hand down. “Look, I’m not trying to piss you off—I’m trying to understand something.”

  “You’re doing a pretty good job of the former. So let’s just-”

  “Let me put it this way,” I cut him off, rubbing my hands over my thighs. They were clammy inside my gloves. “The word I grew up with for ‘gay man’ is literally just pedarasti, and that’s what everyone I knew thought being gay meant. My father, my grandmother, my friends. And before you jump my shit, I’m not saying they’re right. But the most consistent thing—one of the only things everyone in my life all agreed on—was that being gay meant you were fucked in the head. I don’t know how to talk about this! I’m trying… I’m struggling to find the language just to ask questions about it.”

  He rolled his eyes in disbelief. “And I’m saying this is a conversation we really don’t need to be having while we’re balls-deep in a B&E. In a funeral home. With dead people.”

  Suddenly, I snapped. “I fucked around with a priest last night, alright?”

  Zane’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth, closed it, deliberated for a second, then winced.

  I began to pace. “Look: This, this… this YEN has been making me do weird shit. It makes me want to drink, and I can’t stop it. I… saved this guy’s life, we were riding a combat high. He brought brandy in to help us calm down and one thing led to another... before I knew it, he was on his knees and I was… I was-”

  “Woah there. Hold up a second-”

  I turned on him. “And it’s not the only thing. I was supposed to be meeting Angkor for dinner the night he vanished. A date, alright? I asked him on a date. He stood me up.”

  The angry defensiveness had drained from Zane’s expression, replaced by something worse. Pity.

  “So this is why I’m asking you. I know you’re not fucked in the head. You don’t have a Yen. You have your shit together. I thought, I thought maybe hearing how it works for you might help me... sort this out.”

  “Huh. Yeah, what you’re saying you went through, like… I never had that.” Zane frowned, but it was a different kind of frown now. Not anger—or at least, not anger at me. “I mean, I grew up in the liberal college part of Oregon, so there was no pressure one way or the other, really. Mom was a Hawaiian hippy, Dad was cool with everything except racism and heroin.” He jerked his shoulders in a shrug. “Started looking at other guys when I was just a kid. Found my first boyfriend in high school, and it just kind of went from there. Everyone knew, but I was a big guy and a football star, so no one was willing to fuck with me about it.”

  “What do you mean by ‘looking’?”

  “You know, like, checking them out. I figured it out at the beach.” His lips twitched at the corners. “Lots of hot guys and not much in the way of clothes, you know?”

  I’d lived near the beach too, but I couldn’t say I’d spent my youth staring at other boys. Mostly, I’d tried to avoid ‘looking’ at all.

  As the silence dragged on, Zane shrugged again. “So, the thing with the priest. Did you like what he was doing?”

  My chest swelled, and only at the last moment did I realize that I wasn’t supposed to yell in here. I flushed from hairline to collar as I spluttered. “That’s, I-”

  Zane held up both hands. “You don’t have to like, legit tell me, but if the answer is ‘yes’, that’s the answer to your question.”

  “But I don’t think I did like it.” It was my turn to frown. “We were tipsy. I mean, he didn’t actually do anything to me. I made him do things to… him. And he was angry and upset afterward. Said he’d ‘relapsed’.”

  “Well, yeah,” Zane replied. “Collar queens—like, gay priests—are twisted up in some serious denial, you know?”

  He had a point there. “I had no idea what I was doing. It just… happened. Same with Angkor, until he showed his true colors. You know he hit on me the first night he woke up, after we rescued him out of that silo?”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” Zane said. “He’s hit on me, too. I’m pretty sure he’d fuck anything that looks at him for a straight second. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

  So I wasn’t the only one? I was well aware that I wasn’t exactly a dish, but knowing he’d also flirted with Zane was just indignity atop indignity.

  Zane inhaled deeply. Audibly.. He was slightly less tense. “How about we finish this job, go to a bar and wrap this up later? I want to help, but I’m pretty sure there’s bodies in this basement and I really want to get out of here, okay?”

  It was easy to forget how uncomfortable other people got around bodies and coffins and the like. “Just tell me one thing. You don’t like... lose anything, do you? By coming out gay?”

  “Like what?”

  I thought about it. “Sila. Your muchestva.” I knew the words in Russian, but not their direct counterparts in English. “Strength, virility, I guess.”

  Zane laughed, choking the sound with a hand. “Only thing you lose coming out is caring about what other people think, man. I can introduce you to the scene if you want, but before any of that, you and I are going to have a talk. We need to have the safety talk, and some of the like, ah, ‘parley’. You know. The codes.”

  Safety talk? Codes? I’d hoped speaking to him would have alleviated my concerns, but now I felt more anxious, not less. “Alright.”

  “We good?”

  “If anyone hears about this, I will kill you.” I paused. “And them.”

  “Don’t I believe it, too.” He snorted. “Don’t worry, it’s cool. I won’t tell anyone.”

  It wasn’t ‘cool’, because that aura of pity hung around Zane like a bad smell. I knew he was trying. For now, given the circumstances, that was good enough.

  We moved quietly between the rows to the other end of the room. The shelves took up about two-thirds of the basement. In the other third near the door, there was a plastic card table and tools on hooks on the walls, along with three plastic 80-gallon barrels. The lids were hammered down, but a crust of astringent black goo had bubbled up around the seals.

  I wrinkled my nose. “Well. Now I know how the Men in Black ‘ensure your safe departure’ from any given location.”

  “The fuck is going on here?” Zane rarely swore. “Are these-
?”

  “Bodies, yes. That smell is sulfuric acid. I would’ve expected better from the Government, to be honest. Lye is better for dissolving corpses, and it’s a lot cheaper.”

  “Shit, shit shit.” Zane was breathing a little harder. “What do we do?”

  “Keep your voice down. There’s nothing we can do,” I said, moving to the door. “Those bodies have been in there for days. They’re nothing but sludge by now.”

  The door leading up inside was warded, and I could sense intuitively that it was linked to the main defense of the house, the vortex of power inscribed on the front door. I frowned. “Well, this is the end of the road, unless we can muster up a significant sacrifice. Even then, I’d be leaving an incriminating trail behind us.”

  “Magic ward, right?” Zane said. “You know, I could try busting through it in cat form. The magic won’t hurt me.”

  “No. It’s not made to hurt. It’s made to alarm.” I rubbed my jaw as I thought. “You know, I’m betting that the guards patrol in here. They may have some way to go in and out of the locked doors: a token, a talisman. If we can draw some attention and surprise one, we might be able to get our hands on it.”

  “About the best I can do is meow really loudly.”

  I shook my head and looked again at the table. My eyes drifted to the barrels... and then it hit me. I smiled.

  Zane watched apprehensively as I went to the barrel closest to the door. “Go find me something I can use to spoon some of this out. Plastic or glass, not metal. And a crowbar. There’s one on the rack over there.”

  “Uhh-”

  “I know what I’m doing,” I replied, examining the barrels with a flashlight. The light didn’t penetrate the plastic.

  Zane handed me the crowbar first, and I dutifully used it to pry up the lid on the first tank. When it came up, so did the stench: a horrid rotten-egg-and-rust smell. There was a corpse in here, barely anything more than a suitcase-sized lump of blackened flesh. The acid wasn’t pure enough for what I needed, so I tamped the lid back down and tried the second, and then the third. Third time was the charm. The body had only been in there for a day, at most, and the acid was still clear enough that it could be used to burn through wood and metal.

  Zane had managed to find a mason jar somewhere. I cleaned the dust and dead flies from it, set it on the table, and composed myself for magic.

  “Hold your breath as long as you can,” I said. “We’ll retreat to the back of the room. And whatever you do, don’t interrupt me. Not for anything.”

  The big spells weren’t always the most useful. Smaller magic had its merits, such as when you had to move something, but not touch it. I lifted my hands and concentrated, waiting until I could feel the threads and currents of Phi around us, and then waved gently. The jar wobbled, lifted, and then drifted to the barrel. I motioned down, and held the jar in the solution until it filled. The acid burbled and hissed, but it didn’t dissolve the glass.

  It took more effort to keep the full jar steady against the continuous downward pull of gravity, and as I worked, I had a small epiphany. Phi followed the direction of gravity, but not the gravity of Earth: it followed the gravity of the nexus of the GOD organism, the I of GOD. Suddenly, my telekinesis was a lot smoother as I guided the jar to the door, and as it drew closer, the ward remained inert.

  The mage who created these works of art was thorough. I was sure that the paneling, knobs, and hinges were guarded against force, magic, fire, and physical contact by living things over a certain size: burglars with screwdrivers or crowbars, for example. Chemical contact without human contact had not occurred to the caster, at least not for this part of the door. The acid bubbled and frothed, releasing white hydrogen gas as it trickled down.

  I held my breath against the fumes. My eyes were pouring, stinging and red from the steam rising off the metal. Once the jar was empty, I set it down on the floor—carefully—and went to the barrel and fixed the lid down before retreating. Zane was gagging at the back of the room, nose buried in the crook of his elbow.

  “Now what?” He snuffled, voice thick with mucus.

  “We wait,” I said. “Not for long. They’re melting those bodies in lab-strength acid. If I’m correct, then in a few minutes time, that door will just fall off.”

  “It’s going to make a hell of a noise.”

  “It’s the best we can do,” I said. “We need one of those sigil patches they’re wearing to even be able to get into the house.”

  Zane and I both took deep breaths of the relatively fume-free air at the rear of the room, then hustled for the door. The wood had sunk in and blackened. As we reached it, the top hinge gave way and the door slumped in its frame on an angle. Soon, the second hinge was pulled out of the sizzling wood as the cellulose decomposed. It began to lean forward: I reached for the air around it with my Will, pulling it back toward us. The artificial breeze carried the stink of sulfur, but the door fell back in toward us instead of out onto the stairs.

  “Huh?” We heard a man’s voice from the next floor up.

  I turned the flashlight off. We got into position beside the open door, me with my knife, Zane with the crowbar. A few seconds later, a light jogged down the stairwell, bouncing off the walls as the patrolling guard clattered down, rifle up and ready. He burst through the doorway, and as he swung toward me, I caught the muzzle of the gun, pushed it up, and stabbed him in the left armpit as hard as I could.

  Three things happened at once: The knife hit an artery, and white chalky blood gushed from around the hilt under high pressure, pumping in time with the Man in Black’s heart. He kneed me in the balls, and Zane swung the crowbar like a baseball bat across the back of his neck, sending him sprawling on top of me as we went down together. Zane staggered away, and before I could call for help, he threw up.

  “Zane, don’t- GOD dammit!” The Man thrashed as he bled out, semi-conscious. I pushed him off and tucked my hands under my armpits, rocking. I didn’t feel the acute groin pain where it was supposed to be: the nerves down there had some weird arrangement with my hands, and the blow briefly paralyzed them and made them throb with weird, tingling pain. “Zane, they can track you with that! Don’t leave anything behind!”

  Zane looked back at me, panting. His skin was usually a dusky cool brown. He had turned a weird shade of bluish-brown gray. “I can’t fucking help it! Can’t you smell that?”

  The Man’s corpse began to flop, then bubble into gray goo. Zane blanched, and before I could stop him, he covered his face, still retching, and bolted up the stairs, tripping in his haste to get away from the decaying homunculus. I flailed around in the mess for a second, then sighed, gave up until I recovered my composure, then started over again.

  When I got to the top of the stairs, I found myself in the funeral home’s garage. It was a large underground space at the end of a ramped driveway, big enough to hold five cars side by side. There were four vehicles here, but only one was a hearse. Two were nondescript white vans that hummed with magical and electrical resonance, while the other was an honest-to-GOD cement mixer truck. This vehicle had the strongest resonance out of all of them, vibrating with odd energy that set my teeth on edge. It wasn’t the kind of energy that I associated with DOGs or Morphorde, per-se. It was more like… radiation. Zane was as far away from that truck as he could be. He leaned on the hood of the hearse, struggling to keep his breathing steady.

  Frowning, I slung the dead guard’s rifle over my arm, letting it hang from the strap. “What the hell happened down there, Zane? You said you were-”

  “I am. Just. Fine.” He cut in, voice rough from puking. “But that... that thing. Rex, it smelled like Hell. Like, like dead... GOD, I can’t describe it. This whole fucking place smells like that.”

  I frowned. To me, the MiB didn’t smell like much of anything. Their blood and the gray goo was relatively inoffensive compared to the usual array of bodily fluids expelled during a kill. Curious, I turned inward, looking back to Kutkha. In my mind’s
eye, the raven Neshamah hunched on his perch, feathers fluffed.

  “What do you think?” I asked silently.

  “I think that something is terribly wrong here,” Kutkha said.

  He wasn’t wrong. There was an eerie, unsettling feeling to the place that had nothing to do with it being a funeral home. I looked around and tuned in, walking a circle around the cars. There was a row of steel freezers against the far wall, fridges where they stored bodies before taking them to the embalming room. Across from them was a small office, unlocked and open, that had rows of screens with camera feeds, and an elevator used to transport a body and its attending staff to the upstairs floors. Well, to the second floor: it only had one button. There were stairs, too: a narrow, steep stairwell behind an unlocked door. I opened it and looked up inside. They looked like they skipped the first floor as well.

  “So where do we go to get this computer information Talya wants? Upstairs?” Zane asked.

  Possibly? But… no. I swung back, nose twitching, and found my eyes drawn back to the freezers. There was something odd about them, a break in the pattern. There were three freezers, and each had three vertical rows of cadaver trays. I saw the shadowed lines of each door, the brightness of the buttons, and the negative space around them more than I did the freezers themselves… but it was the sound which led me over. Or more accurately, the absence of it.

  Zane said something, but his words were an unformed blob of color as I focused on my senses. Curious, I touched the handles of the pull-out trays. The rightmost fridge had a fine hum that buzzed my fingertips through my gloves, making them twitch spasmodically; the center one did not. The center and the left-hand freezers weren’t humming, even though they had live lights and appeared to be on.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Facade,” I grunted, pressing the button locks and tugging on the tray handles. None of the middle three trays opened. When I tried the left-hand ones, yanking on the middle handle caused all three to shift slightly. Turning one or the other locks on or off didn’t result in anything opening. I was vaguely aware of Zane drifting over to join me as I peered over and around the switches and buttons.